Blizzard talks "painful" 'Diablo III' launch

Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime reflects on the upcoming launch of WoW: Mists of Pandaria and Diablo III's murky launch.

In a recent interview with GI.biz, Morhaime discusses re-launching Diablo III after the title's disastrous original launch.

“Oh, there are definitely things we would do differently,” he explained, “It would be so helpful in advance to know how many people are going to want to play a game. Because we could plan things out a lot better: we can make sure we have enough capacity, we can buy the hardware that we need.”

“The Diablo III launch exceeded out forecasts by an order of magnitude,” he added, “we were very far off. We outsold our full-year forecast in the matter of a week. I have to give our team some credit because they scrambled really quickly and they were able to increase capacity everywhere within a couple of weeks. But the first couple of weeks were a little bit painful and so I would love to do that over again.”

Morhaime stated that the reason why Diablo III's launch was so muddled was simply due to the sheer volume of players.

“I felt like we gave ourselves enough time in terms of the things we could test and the things that were feasible to test. We can’t know how many people are going to come out and want to play.”

“We ran an open beta where we let anyone in the world in who wanted to play the game for free for a weekend. But a lot of people were waiting for the release of the game so we really didn’t have the indication that our forecasts would be off by so much.”